Secret Sharer - Q&A with director Peter Fudakowski

Secret Sharer, a film inspired by a Joseph Conrad short story, premiers in London next week. The Academy Award winning director, Peter Fudakowski, took part in a wide-ranging Q&A with Professor Robert Hampson, Conrad scholar and critic from the Joseph Conrad Society and others, at the Polish Cultural Institute in West London on 9 May after a preview screening of the film.

At the beginning of the Q&A, Fudakowski described how he became interested in Conrad's work. In 1994, he spent a year in Krakow with his family and said he decided to make it 'a Conrad year' studying the author's life and work.

Professor Hampson: Why the Secret Sharer?

Peter Fudakowski: Good question. I think I thought it was a simple story which would translate very easily to film. As I got into it I realised how complex it was - but it was too late.

Professor Hampson: I'm going to raise the question about the difference between that adaptation and 'inspired by' also your addressing that by calling it Secret Sharer not The Secret Sharer. I want to say something general about it before we get into the changes ..

Peter Fudakowski: Yes I suppose the initial idea was to adapt it and then I realised how difficult Conrad is to adapt, and I remember reading something that Andrzej Wajda wrote about The Shadow Line (Smuga Cienia) which he made, I don't know, 40 years ago. He wrote in his diaries a critique of his own work and said Conrad is really difficult. Anything you do - if you add to Conrad stories you end up throwing away - either at the script stage or at the editing stage and what you really need to do it to throw the work up into the air and reassemble it and that's what I should have done, he said. and I read that and I thought that's good advice - so once I'd done that of course, many things started to change.

Professor Hampson: One of the obvious changes is the change in time. Its not the romance of sea. Its not sailing ships. Its a container ship.

Peter Fudakowski: Yes the contemporary aspect. I suppose my wife is responsible for that. My wife Henrietta is my script editor and one of the things she is very insistent about is .. you know you must make it contemporary because if you want modern younger audiences to enjoy this, nothing before me is interesting. I felt that she was right about that and decided to make it contemporary. It would have been lovely to have a big sailing ship but actually probably inordinately expensive as well.

Professor Hampson: The other obvious change is that you've changed the gender of the person .. on board the ship. In the story its the mate of another ship whose a man, whose jumped ship, and in this case its a woman. What was your thinking there?

Peter Fudakowski: That was the thing that I feared most criticism for from my friends in the Conrad Society because indeed it is a naked man that comes on board - and well - lets do a thought experiment . Let's imagine that it was a naked man coming on board this ship and this naked man is taken into the cabin of this young half naked man. I'm afraid that i think through today's eyes, the prism of the contemporary it would have been a story that was really essentially homo-erotica and it was the furthest thing from Conrad's mind. it was then a story about male friendship which you can't really portray so easily now - and so I wanted to make a film about friendship not about sex. Changing the sex of course you haver to deal with it. That added another layer of difficulty dramatically, for me and for the film which is good. That was a challenge - to take a male-female sexually charged situation and turn it into friendship. I thought if I could achieve that, that would be quite an interesting challenge, and, I hope I have.

Professor Hampson: One of the other changes you have made is identifying that the Captain is Conrad and then giving him a Polishness which isn't in the story.

Peter Fudakowski: Yes - that's getting deeper into the story but .. I had to draw Conrad, my hero somehow - and I decided that this story and Smuga Cienia, Shadow Lands are two rather autobiographical stories from Conrad's youth. So I started imagining my hero as a young Conrad. And so I called him Konrad with a K and I delved into his past history and his relationship with his father and mother - his mother (you're a better expert to talk about that) who died in his youth and his father was a great patriot and so on, and so I imagined why did this young man leave the middle of a land mass and go to sea? And I thought to myself well actually, he'd probably had enough of all the tragedy and suffering and decided to escape to sea and cut himself off really, from everything that was Polish. Some of this is speculation, I'm prepared to be attacked, critiqued for imagining some of this

Professor Hampson: There might be another way of explaining that but I was interested in the way you do address the idea of Polishness, and the part of the process he goes through is a reconnection to that Polishness through the relationship with the woman that he's rescued. Or at least in my reading.

Peter Fudakowski: Yes - you know for me I may be totally wrong but I think a lot of Conrad and Conrad's morality and values are Polish or influenced by his Polish upbringing. Catholicism and so on. Even though he wasn't a believer - although there's debate about that - he doesn't seem to have been. His view of nature is that it's totally indifferent to man's fate. Thats very strong all the way through Conrad. Nevertheless those values are still there, right? I think in his work and his writing. And I just imagine young Conrad like all young men of that age, putting that aside. His interest like all young men was to go off and have adventure, make money, meet women, and that's what he does in China. I wanted to imagine young Conrad. No one has ever written about young Conrad. We just imagine the grand man with the beard and a great name.

Professor Hampson: The young man is harder to visualise.

Peter Fudakowski: I don't think there are any diaries from that time .. I don't know if maybe you'd tell me I was inventing too much..

Professor Hampson: I think there are different reasons for him leaving Poland - one was to do with the fact that he would have been liable to 25 years military service in the Russian army. because he was the son of political prisoners. So I think that was a major reason for him going to sea. But he then obviously he said he felt a passion for the sea - he felt an attraction to England retrospectively. He later said he had a specific feeling about England and Englishness that was very much retrospective rather than something that he'd set out with.

Peter Fudakowski: On Polishness - for me that was very important. My Polishness is very important to me culturally and so when thinking about Conrad and his character and this story, I felt that was an element I wanted to bring in. I wanted to make him Polish… it helped me to make him a more realistic character - helped me try to understand him and his motivation. And of course there are some other things that are just purely sentimental. Like the music which I loved. and I still love and I could listen to it a hundred times. And for Poles of course I think it has a different meaning than it does for a non Polish audience and maybe sometimes its the wrong one, I don't know how you feel about it. but I think its a beautiful melody. It is baggage from the past for me and for young Konrad and it's something he doesn't play, doesn't even touch until much later in the story when he opens up the baggage literally .. for him an old patriotic song.

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Questions from audience

Q. The characters speak in Chinese and make it very authentic and I really liked that but it must have ben much more difficult to direct? .. and what Chinese are they speaking?

Peter Fudakowski: Its Mandarin. Actually they're speaking in different accents - some of them are Mongolian, some are Beijing Chinese, some are Bangkok Chinese - but that's natural on a ship -you'd have a collection of ragbag people. I cast faces that we could all distinguish… In terms of directing I had some wonderful assistants who spoke fluent English and Mandarin, so I communicated with them but but after a while we developed a language in terms of performance, controlling performance and it was a delight, it was much easier than I'd ever imagined actually directing them. In fact it was quite good to have a certain distance from them - because they were a bit on their own - they didn't get huge amount of direction from me.

Q. And where did you get that ship from? … years ago there was a film with Peter O'Toole, Lord Jim and that was also on an old tub. I never associate Conrad with glamourous sailing ships.

Peter Fudakowski: They're always old… (finding the ship) That was a piece of amazing luck. I was searching for this ship for months and we found big ships, bigger than that one but they were all busy. Its quite difficult to get a ship. You don't know what they're doing from one month to the next in terms of cargo. So six weeks before the production started we still didn't have a ship. .. money, cast, crew but no ship. Anyway going up and down the river in Bangkok we kept looking a search and finally someone said - oh this one here - this one's going to the scrapyard . sop we got on board and it was perfect. Just what I wanted that green and red and rust so that was just luck. we sailed it for six weeks before it went to Bangladesh to be broken up for scrap.

Q Were the Chinese authorities interested in Conrad? In Polish?

Peter Fudakowski: There was a lot of interest, actually the Chinese love Conrad. the Chinese intellectuals that we came across. He is read in China - which was a wonderful surprise for us. No interest in the Polish. But we spent three years working with the Chinese in China to try and make the film in China with Chinese co-production. Everything has to go through the censors. And stage 1 (they're very charming) they just say 'love your work .. wonderful that you are coming to China to make your film, about China, but please would you just change this thing here..' and then a little bit less of that and you say all right, fine, I can see a way of cutting that . And another year passes and you get more drafts and there are few more changes, and then they say well maybe - we've got some other ideas for you we'd like to suggest and you go, well all right . and the money's coming and they say its all going to happen and by the third year we got a letter from the Minister of Propaganda whatever. The money's here come make your film and we'll send you the script in a couple of weeks times. . And they did. In Mandarin. They sent us a script in Mandarin. It took me a couple of weeks to get that translated and it was quite markedly different. It was a choice we had to make, whether we go with this script and make a film that we didn't want to make or make the film anyway but we'd get censored at the end of fhe production process. If we got censored and then I released the film illegally, which I could have done, none of my cast would have worked again for years. This is what they do. They punish them. So it was a moral trap really. Either you take it after all tis work, which is what they expect you to do. Take it, go forward and make it their way. We didn't.

Q. I was very much moved by the number of Conrad citations you have in the film. Unrecognised ones in the film.
He was a very philosophical about life. Have you noticed? I could recognise some.

Peter Fudakowski: I thought I'd cut quite a lot, Conrad is such a strong force when you are writing - that I had lot of Conrad - just the dialogue in the first script. Unfortunately it sounded so poetic, so literary. it was out of place. There were a few things as I cut the film. So as I cut the film I got critiqued for certain lines or scenes and they tended to be the ones where I kept to Conrad dialogues in so I cut them..

Q. You also brought it the geography of the story.

Peter Fudakowski: ..tt is literally shot exactly where the story starts.

Q I was interested in your faithfulness to the story... for example in the scene where she is looking over the charts - which comes straight out of the story There is a scene in the story where Leggatt the person rescued goes over the charts with the narrator. ...

One of the things the story is concerned with is with doubles. By having the male who is rescued, a lot of the story is concerned with this other person being the double of the narrator. and obviously that particular part goes when its female rather than a male who is rescued. But you are alluding to the double in various other ways which aren't in the original...

Peter Fudakowski: The idea of the dobbleganger really comes out of literary criticism, because when I read the story first it didn't occur to me at all that there might be this other layer of interpretation… But I'd done enough research to read the literary criticism and I thought that was actually quite an interesting idea so I played with this idea and I suggested it by lots of mirrored shots and then the uniforms being similar and her putting on his uniform and so on .. and so yes i was exploring that not in any very serious plot point way. But what did happen of course in the development of the story is that she does become like his alter ego and she's the feminine part of this man and if it wasn't for her and her advice, he wouldn't have succeeded in the mission. So in that sense she was not a doppleganger but his feminine half and that was what I was trying to achieve. This strong woman did have an influence on him growing up and being a man not just the boy that he was at the beginning of the story dressed in that lovely uniform… and then the journey to friendship you know, particularly in the relationship with the woman is very difficult .

So many films have been made on the subject. it is a fascinating subject and its deemed practically impossible in the film world to have a relationship that changes into friendship. So I needed the device actually of the feminine half in order to take the story forward to a sense of friendship. Of course after the end of the film it might change into something else, clearly. But for the purpose of the story it was friendship.

Q I thought it was very interesting the way her relationship with him grows at the same time you have the developing relationship of him with the crew. .. In the story there's the sense that the captain is taking over the ship for the first time. He struggles with the problem of being in command - of whether he will be able to live up to his expectations of himself. Its also clear when he arrives on the ship there's the feeling he's a stranger there. They know each other. They know the ship. He doesn't know either the ship or the crew. And that again adds to the problem that he has in trying to establish himself as the captain as the leader. I thought what came across nicely using the Chinese crew was the sense that the have their own community. Again doing things slightly differently from the story but one way of interpreting the story that worked very well.

Peter Fudakowski: One of the reasons I'm so glad to be able to show this film to the Conradian society is that I want to ask you is has it got anything to do with Conrad?

One critique I could just imagine is - its all very nice but actually its certainly not an adaptation and its got very little to do with Conrad. Its sort of Conrad light. That of course was not my intention. I don't wish to be too self deprecating but I'd like to know what you feel about it.

Professor Hampson: I think to me its the difference between an adaptation and 'inspired by'. I think thats fine. There are a lot of adaptations of Conrad's stories that are not .. one of the problems they have is to find a filmic equivalent of what's going on in the fiction. It was interesting your comment on using the dialogue and finding that it wasn't working in the film. If you're too faithful to the story, you can create something that doesn't work as a film. And this is just with an adaptation.

The distinction between an adaptation and something 'inspired by' I think is then still of interest to the Conradians. with different criteria applied.

.. So that for example with the Duallists by Ridley Scott - thats an adaptation of the story. And what it's doing is finding filmic equivalent of what goes on in the story. It stays very close to the story . in certain places it departs from the story but but when it does, what its doing is doing it in film terms. what Conrad's done in language terms.

Peter Fudakowski: What about Apocalypse Now? which doesn't give Conrad any credit but I'm sure everyone will know that Apocaplyse Now was inspired by Heart of Darkness.

Professor Hampson: I think the first half of Apocalypse Now is brilliant as a film inspired by Heart of Darkness. For me as a Conrad specialist I can see how the correspondence all went through up to that point and it seems a deeply valid translation of that, although a problematic one because of the differences between what is going on in the Congo and what is going on in Viet Nam. But the differences create a space for examination a space for discussion. I think the latter part of the film just loses its way. It gets further from Conrad but also for me it loses its way as a film as well. And I think there are real problems. I think Brando looks amazing when he appears but I know Brando was a surprise for the director because he had put on so much weight and that wasn't expected. And also when he arrived he asked 'what's my motivation?' ..which again wasn't the question the director was wanting. And the whole bit at the end when he seems to be doing an Open University course in early modernism with all those books around him, to me just seems absurd ..

So I think for me as a Conradian the idea of an adaptation is to see how it stays close and faithful to the story in the different media. Something 'inspired by' has much more freedom and the question then is to what extent does it work as engagement with or commentary on the original Conrad story.

Another example would be a film by Chantal Akerman, which uses Conrad's first novel Almayer's Folly. In that case I can see why she needed to say 'inspired by' the novel but i couldn't see much interaction between the two. Whereas this seems more like an engagement with and commentary on the story by moving it into film, moving it into the contemporary and other things as well.

Peter Fudakowski: Thank you that's quite a relief to hear that said in public . I'm sure that Copola didn't give Conrad a credit for fear of being very heavily criticised by the Conradians at the time... That's what I feared as well.

Q I enjoyed your film very much particularly the beautiful photography and scenery. I wonder if you could share any anecdotes with us about that?

Peter Fudakowski: My director of photography was a Pole ..Michal Diwaniuk . I chose him because he'd spent six or seven years in China He'd studied in Poland land then left and gone to China looking for adventure and learnt Mandarin. I thought if I'm directing Chinese actors it would be quite useful to have a director of photography who speaks Mandarin. The adventures of shooting on a big ship - you can imagine - its 100 metres long - 5 - 10 miles off the coast. Weather plays a big part as do tides and currents and so on so and when you are shooting a scene many times over and the ship is doing this all the time and you're trying to get continuity its quite tricky because if you shoot a scene five or six time this way and then that way then the background has changed completely. So we had some fun and games with that and then at night for night scenes you've got to light it, you can't just go by the moon. So then the platform on which the big lights are on are constantly moving. We had to wait while the tide took it back to the right position for us.

I think its a miracle that we all survived . We had to get on one little ship from the ship to the shore every day, 120 of us below deck and above deck and in all sorts of weathers and the lifeboats were all welded or strapped to the bottom of this tiny ship. Health and Safety is not an issue there. Getting off this little ship which bouncing like a cork and the big ship next to it is like a rock.. so getting up the ladder on to the deck. We had fun and games but thankfully no tragedies. no disasters.

Q. Did you do the helicopter shots?

Peter Fudakowski: Yes. I didn't plan it but I did end up having to do everything a director would ever have to do including of course helicopter shots. During the fights scenes I thought I could take a day off - I was exhausted. I had my team of fight organisers and I thought, well, I know nothing about fighting, I'll let them do it. But then I saw them directing my actors and I could see they were going to give them the sort of Kung Fu treatment - all good stuff but for a completely different movie. Suddenly from being gentle seamen they were turning into amazing Kung Fu experts. I realised I had to step in and do this. Its more of a tussle. As you can see there's no hitting and punching. So I managed to direct helicopter shots, and a fight and a sex scene. All very stressful. Every day was different. An extraordinary experience.

Q. Did you use computer graphics? It doesn't show.

Peter Fudakowski: Yes. Thats Polish post production. it took nine months to do six or seven minutes but the engineers, the scientists, the mathematicians constructed everything from scratch. The weather was mathematically created… They created an ocean - depth wind speeds, direction, density of water. They recreated the ship as a three dimension graphic and put that into the water. There are some scenes which are totally generated. It was extraordinary for a small budget film actually.

Q Major awards?

Peter Fudakowski: No.. this is just our third screening. We're adopting a slightly different strategy to the usual strategy for small films which are generally launched in festivals. And that's partly because my feeling about the film is that it isn't a festival film, its an audience film. It's made to please audiences not film critics - well Conradian critics possibly but not film critics. what I've found with cinema over the last five, ten years at festivals is that there's a polarisation and the festivals are breaking either very big films or very niche films which are quite difficult, dark, often about social issues and this is right in the middle. Its neither mainstream, nor is it arthouse so I don't think its an award winning film. I don't wish to be deprecating about it but I do think it's an audience film. We got a good reaction I think tonight and my interest is to make films for people not cinephiles or indeed critics.

Q Could you tell us about the two main actors.

Peter Fudakowski: Yes of course with pleasure. Jack Lamsky - I spent at least two years looking for this actor. I had lots of casting sessions where I found beautiful handsome actors who just didn't have the intelligence in their eyes that I wanted for this role. Or very intelligent actors who weren't attractive. Jack appeared through my casting director two years into my search and I saw him and I immediately said, that's the face. Its the eyes basically. He has very intelligent eyes and he's a handsome lad. I had to check with my female collaborators as well. He starts off as a sort of Jack the Lad literally - the opportunist and so on but the character goes from Jack the Lad the adventurer to someone who is quite serious. I didn't need a beautiful guy with a six pack on his chest and nothing up here, but someone believable. And Zhu Zhu. My producer in Thailand found her. I think he thought she was very beautiful, but she happened to be very bright and spoke English perfectly. I was worried that she is a bit too beautiful - but it's a movie.

Q. What is your next project?

Peter Fudakowski: Its called Coram's Children - set in 18th century London. I feel very passionate about this. We have to make this film. About three childless men who decided to set up the first hospital for foundling children. Orphans. Handel, Hogarth and Thomas Coram. How can I quickly explain it to you. Its Amadeus meets the Madness of King George. I need ten million pounds. All currency welcome.

Q. Could you comment on the influence of your mother ...

Peter Fudakowski: For those of you who don't recognise my father, this is a prompt to say me that the inspiration for this film was entirely my mother's particularly her love of music .. the theme song. I'm very pleased that she does love it. Its subliminal. I didn't realise until the film was actually made and the music was on, that this was one of her all time favourites. But that might just go through the genes. I owe quite a bit to my parents, both consciously and subconsciously.

To book tickets for the premier and see a trailer go to: ICN 16 June 2014 Charity Film Premier: Secret Sharer www.indcatholicnews.com/news.php?viewStory=24965